FORECASTING, VISIBILITY, AND CONTROL

Automating dashboards, budgeting, and reporting to deliver breakthrough visibility of business performance

"The insight and drill-down capabilities to isolate drivers of performance are simply amazing and a step change from where we were before."

THE CHALLENGE

Our client was a roll-up of several legacy payment-services businesses, each with its own systems controlling sales, pricing, operations, and retention. As a result, the business dealt with numerous duplicative KPI definitions, and lacked a single version of true business performance.

Oliver Wyman was engaged to define and agree a set of clear KPI definitions, with metrics consolidated into a single data store, and then to use this foundation to rebuild the budgeting processes via industrialized web-dashboards, giving senior executives a detailed daily view of the business, as well as the ability to drill down to individual employee-level performance.

“The level of insight we now have available is simply amazing"

DEPUTY CHAIRMAN

What we did

UNDERSTOOD THE EMPIRICAL DRIVERS OF BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Oliver Wyman often finds that the connections between the commercial decisions in a business, the operational levers, and the financial P&L can be tricky to untangle. We mapped end-to-end how the connections worked, and how budgeted metrics translated into a financial result. This is often a challenge in subscription or contract businesses, where new customers have different characteristics from the base or recently lost customers. Not being on top of these trends can result in nasty surprises.

CONQUERED HUGE DATA CHALLENGES TO CREATE A SINGLE VIEW OF THE TRUTH

The client's key metrics were previously located in seven-plus different databases, which did not reconcile. Even within each database, there were competing sources of true business performance. Oliver Wyman Labs assembled all the key data feeds into one place, thus enabling the metrics to be properly reconciled and tracked. Smart analytics were then applied on top of this data layer, which in turn became the single source of the truth for commercial performance within the business.

DELIVERED SIMPLE, INTUITIVE SOLUTIONS TO BUSINESS LEADERS

The essence of business performance was collapsed down to less than 10 key metrics, with appropriate performance drill downs provided to each functional area. Members of the executive team are now able to access business performance "live" on their smartphones.